If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

A Virtual Gallium3D Driver Coming For VMware

11-13-2009, 04:10 PM

Phoronix: A Virtual Gallium3D Driver Coming For VMware

For months Sun's VirtualBox virtualization software picked up OpenGL and Direct3D acceleration support for virtualized guest operating systems, but now 2D/3D hardware-acceleration support for those running operating systems under VMware's virtualization products are imminent. It was almost exactly one year ago that VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, but now their motives behind that acquisition are becoming more clear. Being hosted at VMware's headquarters today in Palo Alto, California was a Gallium3D Workshop, where various open-source Mesa developers are currently at and others connecting remotely. At this workshop it has just been announced that a "virtual" GPU driver for Tungsten's Gallium3D driver architecture will soon be publicly released...

That was unexpected. It was, but it wasn't. So as far as graphics acceleration in a Virtual Machine goes wouldn't this be capable of providing graphics acceleration that is as close to bare metal GPU acceleration as possible. If both the host and guest are using Gallium3D drivers could they use Virtualization technologies to connect their drivers, share the hardware, and provide direct acceleration to a guest OS?

Comment

At some point VM 3D acceleration could be mature enough for people to play many graphics intensive games on Windows running in a VM. Imagine loading up Windows XP/W7 in a VM and play a game such as CoD or Crysis at a darn good playable framerate as if you had booted Windows off bare metal?

Comment

At some point VM 3D acceleration could be mature enough for people to play many graphics intensive games on Windows running in a VM. Imagine loading up Windows XP/W7 in a VM and play a game such as CoD or Crysis at a darn good playable framerate as if you had booted Windows off bare metal?

If everything becomes virtualized, that will be the end of anti-cheat software. How can you detect a wallhack that runs outside the VM?

Comment

At some point VM 3D acceleration could be mature enough for people to play many graphics intensive games on Windows running in a VM. Imagine loading up Windows XP/W7 in a VM and play a game such as CoD or Crysis at a darn good playable framerate as if you had booted Windows off bare metal?

Yeah. something like that.

The best you'd be able to do is poke a hole in the VM through 'paravirtualization' technique and say "This memory is directly accessable by both the drivers in the host and in the guest". Then the state trackers issue commands that get read in by the rest of the gallium drivers on the host.

So your adding in a few context changes and that sort of thing. You'd probably get 60-70% performance for most operations.

The ultimate future will just being able to hand off complete control of the video card to the guest OS. That is you let native drivers access the hardware in the native way, but be it controlled in a guest.

We already have that for most PCI devices on very new hardware. KVM and friends have the ability to hand off control of hardware to guests, but with video cards (of course) they are to complicated to be handled in such a ham-fisted manner.

Comment

The best you'd be able to do is poke a hole in the VM through 'paravirtualization' technique and say "This memory is directly accessable by both the drivers in the host and in the guest". Then the state trackers issue commands that get read in by the rest of the gallium drivers on the host.

So your adding in a few context changes and that sort of thing. You'd probably get 60-70% performance for most operations.

The ultimate future will just being able to hand off complete control of the video card to the guest OS. That is you let native drivers access the hardware in the native way, but be it controlled in a guest.

We already have that for most PCI devices on very new hardware. KVM and friends have the ability to hand off control of hardware to guests, but with video cards (of course) they are to complicated to be handled in such a ham-fisted manner.

That could be what Sun's doing with Vbox...adding paravirtualization support to allow hardware to be controlled by drivers on the guest in a virtualized manner without impacting the host or the guest negatively.

This should be quite interesting to see how all this evolves. Someday I'd be able to dump the physical Windows install and just keep "Bill in a box" for those times I want to run a Windows program without all the hassles and bugs of Wine. This would be definitely good for those games and graphics apps that makers can't or won't port to Linux.